I. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to software development tools and, more particularly, to methods and systems for providing software automation tools.
II. Background
Companies spend significant resources creating, testing, installing, and configuring software products. Dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of servers may need software installed and configured. Companies may hire a number of employees to install, configure, and maintain software products on these servers, and each configuration for software products may use different environments. An environment may be the hardware and software configuration of one or more computers, including a graphical user interface, operating system, networking interface, programming tools, database types, and the like.
Different environments may be used to accommodate varying needs of a company. For example, an environment for a software program in the development stage may be different from the environment in a testing stage, which may be different from the environment in a production stage. Companies often utilize an Information Technology (IT) department with a number of employees to develop these environments on the company's servers.
A number of different users may interact with and maintain this software and the environments on which it runs. During a development stage, a user such as an engineer or software programmer may interact with an environment while developing a software program. In a testing stage, an employee in charge of testing the software program may interact with one or more environments to ensure that the software program will properly work in a variety of environments. During testing and production stages, one or more network managers and engineers may configure an environment for the installation of the software product. End users may then interact with the environments to use the software products for their business needs. Users in the testing and production stages may divided into two categories: system administrators, responsible for low-level configuration of the software products such as the network configurations, creation of user identifiers, and the like; and deployers, who may perform higher-level configuration of software products such as middleware. Middleware may be defined as a software layer that lies between an operating system and the applications installed on computers and that allows the applications to execute using bundled services provided by the middleware. These users and roles are exemplary only, as companies may assign employees to unique tasks.
IT departments also may ensure that the software products are updated regularly. However, the process of updating such a software product may cause reliability issues. Sometimes, the software update itself contains errors. Other times, the software update may not be properly installed. For example, a company that updates their software may not have adequately tested the updated software to ensure reliability on all of the environments that users may choose to operate the software with.
This process of developing, testing, installing, and configuring environment components including software products—all of which may occur as part of provisioning—is time consuming and leads to errors when performed manually by users. For example, if a user responsible for testing software enters incorrect values for the configuration of a testing environment, the results will be wrong. Even if a software product is properly tested, it still must be installed and configured in different environments on potentially thousands of servers, which can also lead to errors. This process of manually testing, installing, and configuring software in varying environments is prone to errors, time consuming, and expensive.
Accordingly, a need exists to provide automated provisioning of software products.